Leader of the White Volunteer Army which in 1919, during the Russian Civil War, nearly succeeded in defeating the "Red" Bolshevik forces...

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Although they had defeated Germany in World War I (1914-1918), the nations of Western Europe, particularly Britain and France, feared its potential resurgence and looked for a collective means of resisting it in the 1920s and 1930s. Over the course of these two decades this endeavor included bilateral security alliances with Eastern European nations, faith in international organizations such as the League of Nations to keep the peace, multinational antiwar agreements, lobbying for a formal security commitment from the United States, and the official appeasement of German demands to revise the World War I peace settlement. Yet, all these efforts failed. Germany was not deterred from its aggressive course, and its invasion of Poland in September 1939 drew Britain and France into conflict for the second time in twenty-one years...

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When revolution erupted in Russia in 1917, many of its leaders self- consciously identified their situation with the turbulent era of the French Revolution (1789). Events, trends, individuals, groups, and ideologies either took on or were assigned identities that mirrored previous occurrences in revolutionary France. Bolshevik war commissar Lev Trotsky was compared to French revolutionary general and later emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Trotsky's great rival, Josef Stalin, who was accused of reversing revolutionary ambitions as he rose to power, was said to have ushered in a "Thermidorian Reaction," an allusion to the restrained period that followed the most radical phase of the French Revolution...

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As the nations of Europe moved toward war in the summer of 1914, one of the burning questions was whether Britain would enter the fray. Despite its growing closeness to France and Russia in the decade before the war, Britain had avoided firm alliance commitments to both powers. Although its relations with Germany had become strained, a series of diplomatic visits and talks suggested that these tensions might be ameliorated. Observers could only speculate what the British might do...

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The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 produced determined opponents. The rise of a radical socialist regime confronted the elites of the old order, challenging their role in government and society, as well as their existence. Within only a few weeks, organized armed opposition began to take form, plunging Russia into a civil war that the Bolsheviks eventually won...

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This chapter debates the effectiveness of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As an authoritarian government, the tsarist state employed political police to monitor opinion, investigate revolutionary groups, follow suspicious and disloyal suspects, and generally prop up the regime through police work...

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On the night of 16-17 July 1918, the former tsar Nicholas II, his family, and their servants were executed by Bolshevik forces in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg. Since the former tsar's abdication in March 1917, their fortunes had been uncertain. The royal family had been under house arrest in different parts of Russia at various times, and little attention had been paid to them. Their ultimate fate remained a mystery until 1991 when their remains were finally identified. The exact circumstances of their deaths are known in some detail, but responsibility has been relatively difficult to assign...

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Recent work on communism, including Stéphane Courtois's The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1999), makes a strong case that terror was the only real means of ensuring stability and security for communist governments. In the Russian case, émigrés and other opponents of the Soviet regime have long repeated this argument. Terror, enforced by a secret police, concentration camps, arbitrary killings, and other coercive practices and institutions, helped ensure Bolshevik power...

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A leading argument about Russia, famously defended by the prominent scholar Richard Pipes, maintains that despite the revolutionary change the country experienced in 1917, little changed in practice in Russia's government and society. In both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, he suggests, the state was run by a managerial elite that favored autocratic philosophies and opposed independent initiative and institutions functioning within society. Both states kept up a secret police, a militarized society, government leadership in the economy, a rigid social structure, and other items that suggest more continuity than change...

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Kiev was the first state to arise among the East Slavs. Created during the second half of the ninth century, it was named for the city of Kiev on the right (or west) bank of the middle Dnieper River, where its grand princes resided from about 880 until the second quarter of the twelfth century. Although the Kievan state had fragmented into a series of virtually independent principalities by the mid twelfth century, these principalities, as a whole, are referred to as Kievan Rus until the time of the Mongol conquest (1236-1240)...

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